opportunity will work wonders in the comparative aptitudes of the sexes. Women may well exclaim at the little use men have made of their greater opportunities: boldness in mental adventure is not a salient virtue of our men. Still, even in England, the cloud of scouts which precedes the plodding main army is composed chiefly of men. Women have yet to prove their equal ability for this service. They have got to improve themselves in map-reading if they are to enter these ranks, and maps are only instances of those bogies to most women, abstractions. They take her beyond the immediate range of vision, beyond the hills on the horizon about which she feels instinctively that she has no right to let her imagination play unless the further prospect is displayed before her physical eye, and she is, therefore, apt to pull a man up short when he is measuring the distant ground beyond his view and to bring him back to the church tower in the foreground, if not to the village pump. For this reason general discussion with English women is so often fruitless: they cannot get away from the concrete and, intensely interested as they are in the thing immediately to be done, they feel at sea in the elaboration of general principle from which immediate action could be best taken or criticised. So often, too, a man is brought up short by finding that a woman is winding all his ideas, which have no immediate attachments to anything within view, round some visible peg in the vicinity, or is mentally striving to find the visible peg which she is sure is really the point of attachment. The worst is when she imagines the peg, quite wrongly, to be stuck into her own _amour propre_: all argument is then futile, for the two are hopelessly at cross purposes. When a man is trying to set out a general point of view and a woman is asking herself meanwhile: “why is he saying this now and to me?” the chance of mutual comprehension is slight.